Obviously you have a bigger problem when it comes to larger sites like NY Times, but why not just let me say "hey, show me tech products because I like tech" to personalize, rather than trying to infer what I want and get it wrong? I'd be more than happy to tell every ad network ever what I actually care about, but right now all of the optimization is focused on guessing what I care about instead.
I like this sort of "personalization" podcasts do in their ads: with human judgment where the content creators exercise editorial control, not some black box chum box any rando can dump ads into.
At the time I was shopping for a Pebble smartwatch and kept checking the site if it's on sale, because Pebble had a tendency to do short-time discounts without actually announcing them. After a few times, almost every Google ad was for "Pebble Smartwatch". It not only wasn't useful, it was annoying.
Instagram has an interesting model. Maybe because of the visual medium that it works well for me. I'll purposely do searches for a thing I'm interested in and click on related posts. After a couple days I'll start getting ads for companies selling things I'm looking for. Recently, new bedding & sheets. I'd imagine it's the same model Facebook uses but i rarely login there.
You'd take a survey about your interests and/or things you're in the market for then you would get a monthly email with a variety of targeted ads. Over a year ago I wrote down in my "ideas" notebook "privacy respecting opt-in email advertisements" but then when I looked at it again later on I thought "I don't think anyone would sign up for this" haha.
I prefer contextual ads, ie. related to what I'm currently looking at, not what my ad profile thinks my personality is based on something unrelated I did on another device last week.
That would be my preference for browsing the web, or looking at results of a search. But what about the ads that rely on doom-scrolling? The ones that are inserted every two posts on a Facebook feed would be hard to make contextual, for example.
Both of these are better that tracking your activity all over the web and using that to target you.
After about ten years or so of Kindle ownership, I recall clicking the ad and buying the book exactly once. Yup, a sci-fi book, and it was pretty damned good as I recall. The title, you ask? Hell if I know, Amazon never showed me another book from that author ever again. And I wish they would, because I can't remember which one in my "stacks" of sci-fi is the one I want.
> So long story short, personalized ads are just as useless to me as un-personalized ads, only creepier, and I'd prefer not to be stalked.
As much as you think the ads are doing a poor job, they're likely doing a better job in aggregate than alternatives.
Retargeting ads deliver higher value than prospecting ads so that's likely why you get so many more of those.
In the case of retargeting ads, you can run tests to figure it out. When I was doing more on the marketing side, I used to find a non-profit and then show ads for the non-profit to my retargeting audiences. That way we could test to see what kind of value our retargeting ads had vs. a completely irrelevant retargeted ad.
For the most part, the relevant retargeted ad outperformed irrelevant by enough magnitude to make the retargeting campaign profitable.
Call me old school (I’m a 70s baby, 80s child). I enjoyed the content-linked advertising in magazines. I actually read them and used them to learn the market around my interest.
Robot selected ads which follow me around claiming to know what I like based on interactions I had do all the following:
- creep me out because I know I’m being followed
- annoy Me by removing any semblance of my own agency in the event: at least with content-linked ads I have chosen to consume that content and I feel like I want to in that zone
- annoy me by getting me wrong
- annoy me by assuming I’m just like everyone else that ticked the same boxes/set the same flags
- annoy me by presenting mostly mainstream stuff rather than small-scale/artisan/bespoke/local stuff that would be much more interesting. I appreciate that this one ought to work better if the advertising host/network knew where I was browsing from (which is a step towards tracking)
The tracking and bidding has completely destroyed what was actually good about advertising for the consumer.
No. If I have to be surrounded by messages trying to manipulate me (which is what ads are, by the way), then I don't want them to be personalized for extra effectiveness (at manipulating me).
I don't really understand how some people seem to treat ads as some kind of neutral, helpful information source. It's almost like saying "I don't mind propaganda, since it's such an efficient way to find out what to think."
Even though I'm aware of it, I still fall for YouTube recommendations. My brain still lights up when I see an ad for a product I recognize. I'm still impressed by the sponsored Amazon search results.
Personalization only makes this worse. Now, that product that I made the difficult decision to pass on will taunt and distract me even in situations when I should be focusing on different things.
Major firms that switched from outsourced “personalized” ads (ad networks w/ retargeting) to selling ads against content, found their ad revenue go up, and their advertisers found conversions go up.
Turns out that 50 years of advertising industry had gotten pretty good at tailoring ad messaging and placement to content for moving product — much stronger than endlessly showing people ads for a product they just searched and already purchased.
An example, I visit Amazon and my recommendations for the "buy it again" section are all very expensive networking equipment that I literally just ordered from Amazon to build out a new home network. There aren't any recommendations for consumables, like the box of exam gloves, hair gel, or the windshield wiper fluid tablets that I purchased in the last 6 months.
Any advertisement is manipulation. Think about it: the purpose of an ad is to influence your decisions primarily for the benefit the self-interest of the party that paid for the ad (otherwise they wouldn't have paid for it). Any benefit you derive from your decision is secondary, and doesn't typically factor into the decision to take out the ad. That's pretty clearly manipulation.
However, there are definitely differences in how manipulative an ad can be. An ad for a plumber in the yellow pages is not very manipulative, but a targeted political ad meant to make you angry that's been interjected into your Facebook feed is very manipulative.
But that's not what modern advertising is. Let's look at a real car ad. Here's the first ad for a discrete vehicle that wasn't a Lambo that I found on youtube searching for "car ad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk5QL_kKN_g.
It's message is roughly "if you drive a Land Rover you'll kinda be like this rugged, skillful, and cool adventurer guy who's driving a Land Rover." It doesn't mention price once and barely touches on any features. That's pretty par for the course for modern car ads: they aren't selling the product, but an emotional connection to a lifestyle.
Here's another one, it's the first one I found searching for "car ad" limited to this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYkLjcQP26M. It doesn't mention price or and features. It's just pure association of positive emotions with the product.
The Land Rover looks rugged, but "a sleek fusion of zen...and spacecraft" is more my style. The Nissan Ariya is also a force, which is a big plus. Nissan it is, then!
> What do you consider an advertisement? Is a business sign an advertisement?
Product catalogs, menus, and business signs aren't advertisements (though sometimes they contain some marketing or are manipulative, but that's less common with them than with ads). They can be simple informational documents, and are cheap compared to an ad campaign. Ads are typically paid placements in some kind of media, meant to influence a consumer to benefit the advertiser (usually by making a purchase, eventually).
> I consider a lunch special saving me the time of thumbing through a menu...
It would also save time if they just ordered for you. You'd save the time, they'd get to sell you their item with the highest profit margin. Win-win?
Here's an example of a current automotive special, these are what dominate Google and FB ads (at least with the 150 automotive clients we work with) and there's typically some copy with it soliciting the price and some incentives. If someone's seen an ad there's dynamic ads which can be tailored to that audience. https://pictures.dealer.com/h/huntingtonbeachchryslerjeepcll...
> It would also save time if they just ordered for you. You'd save the time, they'd get to sell you their item with the highest profit margin. Win-win?
For example, the local gourmet Taco shop (cafe to the restaurant) normally has tacos for about $3.99 and on Tuesday they're $1.99, advertised on special with a drink, I know the tacos are good and that's a great deal. Their highest margin item is the auga fresca (which they sweeten with agave), they charge about $4.50 for that. Thanks for taking the time to let me see things from another perspective.
Marketers have already done this without targeted advertising for decades and gotten extremely good at it. Now they have the equivalent of nuclear weapons (individual profiles and data) and you still think it's going to turn out ok for the people?
In my experience, it's the opposite. Non-personalized ads show me a broad range of items that I might possibly be interested in. The same way that newspaper, television, and magazine ads do. While personalized ads show me the same ads for the same products that I've either already purchased, or no am no longer interested in for weeks or months after I've moved on to other things.
frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world
I find this argument... odd. Why, as a consumer, which is how you've framed the overall argument, would I care even a little about the efficiency use of money in this world? I think to refine your point: Why would I give fark one about whether an advertiser's money is spent efficiently, and why is that even my concern at all?
Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for
There is. For example, if you're into gardening, you read gardening magazines and garden-related advertisers advertise in those magazines. Easy peasy.
This is old tech that the dead tree folks figured out centuries ago. What's changed is that digital advertising isn't about actual advertising. It's about getting rich quick and easy without doing any heavy lifting that the legacy ad companies did.
Inherently ads are made to manipulate your behavior. I'd choose being manipulated the least possible.
On the second point, my spouse and I, each of us on our own devices, one of us can search for something, browse a website, and then the other one will start to see the ads for such in their Instagram feed (and for the record, it is usually me seeing the things my spouse is looking for). It is completely insidious and it needs to stop!
Personalized ads created by siphoning data off everything I do not so much.
Put it this way, to use an example, what kind of relationship would you prefer, someone who knows all the things about you because they asked or someone that comes up to you and is like 'yeah, I know you like this that and the other because i've been following you everywhere you go, listening to your phone calls and installed a RAT on your computer?
> it is inefficient use of money in this world
That's the advertiser's problem, not mine, and their choice to spend money just as it's mine to buy what they're selling. Advertising is already largely a guessing game of how to appeal to people and where to do it, and the only way to make it easier /today/ is by violating our privacy. They could spend the money however they want and choose to advertise.
If the data being gathered is purely to give me better recommendations for better targeted products then sure. If that level of personalization is restricted to just me as a user where I and only I can select the ad selection and that personalization remains on my machine.
The Facebook CA scandal demonstrates to me how frankly these companies are straight untrustworthy. I do not want political/security/insurance/job agencies getting anywhere near any of this data.
It is a solution to monetization. It is not the only solution. Lack of economic development has been because of the addictive nature of fascist behavior.
Non-personalized vs personalized is not the question for me; companies might still collect the same data from my "experience" habits.
If they are going to do that I want more profit from it than a custom news page.
Like I want money from the company leveraging my identity for the company's bottom line. I want some of that money if you are going to get a simulacra of me in a fucking database.
And until we get there we are stuck with a few rich lawless men keeping me for themselves.
If you were talking about some sort of imagined strong AI personalization I might prefer that assuming ad free wasn’t an option, but this absurd, deep from within the uncanny valley personalization is worse than generic advertising.
The only place I am exposed to generic ads are when watching sporting events at a bar or at someone’s house. Everywhere else I get ads blocked or get “targeted” ads that mildly (at best) offend me that that is what the algorithm thinks I’d be interested in buying. I prefer the generic ads.
It's been fascinating to get a glimpse of the bigger universe of ad content for women, doctors, lawyers, the infirmed... instead of just the $150 hoodies and baldness pills I used to see constantly.
Why would I want even 1% of the content I'm consuming to be polluted with irrelevant garbage? That's a huge amount of time and mental effort filtering out stuff like toothpaste ads because I googled directions to my dentist's office.
Nope. Ad blockers on EVERYTHING and custom CSS for sites that whine about ad blockers or display a sea of whitespace to inflate page view times.
Advertising is the new smoking. We do not fully understand the damage it does to society and our planet, but it is huge.
Personally, the only time I had mildly relevant ads was back when I had an account on Instagram. It served ads for local businesses that actually kinda matched my interests. The rest is just "oh, you searched for info on a long-dead general? Must be interested in WW2 replica medals, buy fifty!"
If I'm reading an article about astronomy, give me a link to telescopes to buy. Don't show me the washer/dryer that I've been looking for in another context in my life.
I would even take content-customized ads with slight tweaks based on my personal profile, but still relevant to the content at hand. For example, if I'm in eastern Nebraska, give me the telescope ad from the example above. But if I'm in Philadelphia, maybe show me a link to the observatory at the Franklin Institute.
I would think ads are meant to drive you into the market for a product and service, and other marketing tools are made to get you to pick a specific offering.
For manufacturers? Sure. But what about storefronts? Having the best price won't matter if no one knows about it.
My thinking (probably wrong) is, if I am in the market for (to use the example someone else mentioned) a pebble smartwatch then I am probably going to look for the best price myself. No reason for storefronts to spend money putting their ads with their price up on unrelated sites and apps, if I'm going to search for a good price for free. It would probably be better just to buy and ad on the search term "pebble smartwatch" and advertise the price.
In other words, allow advertisers to put all their personalized / targeted ads into a common ecosystem, but allow me to dip into that when I'm looking for some specific purchase.
That would mean that advertisers wouldn't have tracking on almost every website and inside almost every smartphone app, gathering information, taking up screen real estate, and consuming valuable bandwidth and user attention.
I may be an outlier since I generally try and turn this stuff off everywhere. I also pay for a lot of ad-free content that I like (Stratechery, Stay Tuned with Preet, Persuasion, etc.).
I think the incentives from ads are a corrupting influence in building stuff that users want. I think the 'personalization is good for users' argument is often just a rationalization.
Because there's no money in that. What's the value in selling you something that you've already decided you want to buy? Advertisers are trying to get into your head and manipulate your perception to make you open your wallet where you otherwise wouldn't have. And when you do decide to purchase a product, that it's the advertiser's brand which you think of first.
The entire podcast until recently has been supported by no more targeting than guessing about the demographics.
No. I simply do not ever look at ads. I've never, in 30 years of browsing the web, intentionally clicked on an ad.
Furthermore, I don't want a company keeping a dossier on me. The exchange of seeing ads for something I might want isn't worth the assault on my privacy, if it worked. And it doesn't work, so no thank you.
If I decide on my own to buy something, it won't be hard to find. I don't need to tell advertisers what I'm in the market for. I can just tell Google or Amazon what I want and I'll find it immediately, even though I'm blocking the ads.
Ads aren't needed for monetization of anything I care about.
Ads are only needed for businesses to scale quickly without having to actually provide a service worth paying for, and that's something we would be better off without.
For example websites could have variables like mental state (like knowing of you're depressed) and show you ads that could "work better" on you. I think this is unacceptable.
A device on which to read articles about wars in the middle east
An donation to Red Cross/Doctors without Borders/relevant charity
Books on the history of the Middle East...
A Netflix documentary about the Middle East, offering a free Netflix trial if you want to watch it...
FB would show me an ad for the perfect obscure Kickstarter project that I was happy to back. Win-win.
I also remember a funny experience with Google Maps 2 years ago. I had my home and work addresses on profile. They're both in the same city and close enough that it's possible to walk between the two. I was looking at the closest way to go from the office to another place not far away, on foot. The top suggestions google thought I would have a use for while looking around my destinations were hotels. When I live maybe an hour away.
So I figure if Google's recommendations are so useless even though I gave them precise information, how exactly is some random adtech company going to figure something useful for me when all they supposedly have is infered information?
If the value per ad decreases, services will need to display more til the user generates enough value to support the costs they incur.
If TV was able to cater ads to individual viewers then ad breaks would be a lot shorter.
Or they could sell the same amount of ads as they do now for higher prices. Which one do you think the company would pick?
The length of ad breaks is determined by what 'price' the customer is willing to pay in terms of their time.
I am not sure what your point is.
> If the value per ad decreases, services will need to display more til the user generates enough value to support the costs they incur.
What they need to do is to find a way to pay their bills. If ads allow them to do that then it's great (maybe non-personalized work well enough? Or contextual targeting, as others have suggested in this thread). If users cannot stand the increasing amount of ads then they will stop using their service. Or maybe these companies can adopt a mixed model where people can pay to not see the super intrusive ads, and everyone else gets the ads?
Personalized ads is one of the 'features' of ATSC 3.0 whenever that finally rolls out: https://www.techhive.com/article/3268635/next-gen-tv-to-ushe...
The ones that were personalized where insulting. Like Facebook showing me ads for healing stones when I have my religion marked as atheists.
Facebook needs a lot less data and to force their adbuyers to actually target their ads. Probably though they don't because then the ad buyers will find out how little they actually gain from the ads.
Still will be relevant to what you're doing and where you're spending your digital time but will lack the cross-site personalization and hyper-detailed targeting layers currently available to advertisers.
If I'm reading reviews about a certain product category, it's a fair bet I might be in the market for such a product. So the site could show me relevant ads.
If I'm reading a site devoted to a particular topic or activity, the publisher might reasonably guess that I could be in the market for related products, and offer relevant ads.
None of this requires any privacy-invasive tracking.
If I'm reading a general news site, the site shouldn't have any more idea what I'm "in the market for" than the publisher of a print newspaper I might buy.
If I'm browsing used-car listings, the site shouldn't have any idea what genre of novels I like to read, what my grocery cart usually contains, where I go to work out, or how many pets I have. Why does anyone think it's OK for a company to surreptitiously gather that sort of personal information about everyone?
Vogue subscribers are probably in the market for new designer clothes. People who watch Cesar Milan are probably in the market for pet supplies. Someone driving down a highway is probably in the market for gas and a snack. Someone who searches for “affordable laptop” is probably in the market to buy a new computer.
You don’t need to track someone’s every move to serve them relevant ads.